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I was reading through some articles when I came across this thing called the Filter Bubble. A Filter Bubble is a state where the business intelligence of the websites decides for you what kind of information will be useful to you and what is not. In the beginning of the era of internet it was a boon as the businesses showed only the things that the user would like to buy based on his previous purchases, clicks, etc. But it should’ve been limited to products only instead of moving on to content.

The Filter Bubble(courtesy: brainpickings.org)

The problem with Filter Bubble being active on content is that now-a-days I only see content that I should be seeing according to the AI programmed systems and not the one that I would like to see. A lot of content that is outside of my filter bubble suddenly becomes invisible to me. If let’s say I searched for Classical Rock songs of 60s and listened to a few of them, the recommendation Engine will only show me other rock songs from 60s and not from the other ones. I’ll be missing out on other information there.

I pondered upon it for a while and I came up with a solution for this. I’ve subscribed to different channels of content on different social networks. There is no secret that the information that we are receiving these days comes directly from some social network or the other. This small hack doesn’t really kill the bubble, but definitely helps inflating it.

I’ve reorganised all my liked-pages, twitter following handles, quora followers etc. to make sure that they are completely independent thereby showing me a different/new set of content on each of the social networks. I’ve been doing this for the past 6 months and I do see that the results are showing up now. I do not miss out on any critical information also at the same time I get to consume a lot of content. After all, in today’s world, content is power.